Martin Lemberg-Pedersen

Effective Protection or Effective Combat? EU Border Control and North Africa

This chapter traces and conceptualizes the evolution of the EurAfrican borderscapes during the 2000s. It points out how a popular, but flawed, perspective that sees borders through a closed-system perspective is responsible for much knowledge production and policy-making in European border politics, including the critical image of Fortress Europe. This image, however, fails, it is argued, to appraise the border regime’s functionality as a transnational network of control nodes. The chapter explains how the traditional conceptualization of forced migration, although important, has viewed border control as a response to forced migration and has therefore not seen how the border control regime in itself is also causing forced migration. The various ways in which states’ border control yields displacement is labelled border-induced displacement and explored. The chapter thus traces the longstanding European externalization of detention camps to Gaddafi’s Libya, the Italian–Libyan Friendship Treaty of 2008, and how it fed into policy driven by the Dutch, British and Danish governments, which had pursued variations of such externalization of European control and responsibility since the 1980s. It also details the kind of issue linkages characterizing the politics of the EurAfrican borderscapes. Finally, and continuously, the chapter interrogates migrants’ humanitarian conditions in the EurAfrican borders.

Losing the Right to Have Rights: EU Externalization of Border Control

In March 2011, 72 men, women and small children from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Nigeria escaped the violence-ridden Libyan capital of Tripoli as they boarded a small boat set to carry them to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Quickly, though, the boat’s fuel tanks ran dry and they began to drift aimlessly around on the vast Mediterranean Sea. Survivors later told of how an Italian helicopter marked “army” had dropped water and cookies onto the boat and then left again. Several days later, two helicopters from a nearby French warship also flew over the boat, and even though the passengers held up two small babies to the sky in order to show their desperate plight, these pilots also turned away. Despite the Ghanian captain’s repeated satellite phone calls for help, no help emerged from a Mediterranean Sea filled with NATO warships helping to oust the Libyan dictator Gaddafi. As one day followed the other, the passengers of the boat began to starve to death. An Ethiopian survivor told how “Every morning we would wake up and find more bodies, which we would leave for 24 hours and then throw away.” As the parents of the two small babies died, the survivors saved a bottle of water to keep the babies alive, but to no avail. They also passed away two days later. When the boat finally, after 16 days, washed back up on the shores of Libya, 61 of its 72 passengers had died.1 This tragic case is not unique. More than a thousand people drowned in the Mediterranean following the North African spring and, according to the NGO United Against Racism, 15,551 people have died since 1993 in the attempt